With sensor technology seeping virtually into every walk of today's life, it is now that much more practical and feasible to think of secure and smart buildings.The next generation homes and offices will have the capability of being self sufficient in terms of monitoring their security and reporting threats. They are in fact expected to do a lot more. They will be capable of monitoring their energy consumptions, health status of various appliances and build their own internal networking systems to help energy efficient pervasive computing.
Smart homes
Smart homes are equipped with smart grids that form a home area network that have greener and cleaner power saving capabilities. Sensor technology plays a key role in sensing and monitoring the use of energy and resources that help in effective use of the energy with reduced wastage and possible storage of energy for future use. Smart homes will also be capable of protecting themselves from burglary. There has been a lot of interesting work going on towards the idea of the ability to localize a source of threat within the building.
Smart offices
The concept of smart offices has been a topic of heavy commercial interest. Smart offices are envisioned to have the required networking to provide information of the locations of various available devices that would perform a given task. The devices communicate with each other to divide tasks efficiently thereby reducing waiting periods and providing for organized use of resources. This organized use of resources makes it possible to put some of the devices to sleep/reduced power consumption mode whenever necessary. Smart offices have an improved facility to do quick localization of sources of threat (example: find the exact room/cabin where the fire started off). This drastically reducing the amount damage done to the infrastructure. Smart offices have better surveillance and provide for a safer work environments. The energy aware and security aware offices are also rapidly gearing towards providing for easy and context aware indoor navigation.
Smart Structures
In the 21st century, it is extremely important for structures in public use such as malls, theaters, flyover, bridges etc. to be monitored continuously for possible threats to prevent situations of massive loss of human lives. Sensor technology is playing a key role in bridging the gap between existing means of supervising the health status/possible threat to security of structures and the requirements of the next generation. There is a lot of fascinating work that has been feeding into the idea of locating the exact location of the source of threat or the exact location of a crack in a bridge (for example). It is current hot topic as to how to deploy sensors for the best possible supervising of the structures.
The so called next generation is not so far away from today. Several of these ideas have already been put to use in many cases and are still in experiment phases in some cases. All the next generation needs is those tomorrow's engineers who can look beyond just catering to the needs of the industry and make the idea of 'green and safe everything' a reality.
Awesome article Hems :-). Title 'Future Engineering' ani pedthe inka apt ga undedemo ani na opinion re :-)
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